Strong? Stable? He's got to be kidding

Nick Clegg said the party that won the most seats and votes should have first go. He said he wanted to ensure strong and stable government in the national interest. He made plain he has little personal time for Mr Brown. His mentor Lord Ashdown on Sunday said Mr Brown was personally unsuited to coalition. David Laws said a few hours ago that the Lib Dems and Conservatives were down to negotiating over specific policy details, but a deal was near. How then will they explain themselves if, as Gordon Brown has announced, they are now negotiating a coalition of the losers with Labour?

This is the central question that Mr Clegg is considering tonight as Westminster contemplates the events of the past half hour. In particular, he must show his party the maths: given that a Lib-Labour-etc coalition can barely command a majority, and that Labour is divided on PR, where will the votes to get this through come from? Gordon Brown's ploy to keep himself in power for another few months and Labour in power for a parliament is jaw-dropping. Yet while it may be dodgy, immoral, Mugabe-like, it is constitutional. As he pointed out, we are a parliamentary system and if you can fix the numbers, you win. Of course, so much of what he said is patent nonsense, not least the idea that the country wants electoral reform. As I wrote yesterday, Britain voted 3-1 against proportional reform last Thursday.

The immediate issue is what David Cameron says in reply. He can point out that he tried his best to make a deal work: he acted in the national interest. Does he carry on with the talks with Mr Clegg? Is this no more than a squeeze ploy by the Lib Dems? If Mr Brown's scheme works, then he can sit back and wait for a Lib-Lab-etc coalition to fall, as it surely will do eventually. It can just about put the numbers together, but will have to spend a lot of cash on bridges to nowhere in Scotland and Orange culture centres in Ulster. And then he can hope the country will give him a mandate in the election that follows. But in the meantime, we get market turmoil, and a government made up of two losers and eventually led by someone who was not on the scene during the election. Mr Cameron has played it right so far, but he has to keep moving to avoid the party discussing how it ended up in this position.